This Tragic Gospel suggests that the "Gospel" of John intended to supplant the first three gospels and succeeded in gaining undue influence on the early churches. This study focuses on the tragic moment when Jesus praysA for deliverance from his impending death in the garden of Gethsemane. Ruprecht contends that John rewrote this scene in order to convey a very different dramatic meaning from the one reflected in Mark's gospel. In John's version, not only did Jesus not pray to be spared, he actually mocked this prayer, embracing his imminent demise with godlike confidence. Ruprecht believes that this dramatic reinterpretation undermined the tragedy of Jesus's death as Mark imagined it and so paved the way for the development of a kind of Christianity that focused far less on compassion in the face of human suffering. John's Jesus offers the faithful food so that they will never hunger, water so that they will never thirst, and the promise of a world in which no faithful person ever sheds a tear. Mark's Christians do suffer, but they witness to suffering and death differently...with compassion. Mark's Christ suffers, like all Christians after him, but he embodies a tragic hope in the promise of a faith shored up by love and compassion.

This Tragic Gospel

How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr.

Jossey-Bass

Copyright © 2008 Louis A. Ruprecht
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7879-8778-7

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Chapter One

In the Beginning ...

The Modern Quest for Christian Origins

Tragedy is the form that promises us a happy ending. It is also the form that is realistic about the matter. -Walter Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1967)

When the Romans completed their long war against Mediterranean piracy, every renegade harbor on Crete lay in ruins. Phalasarna, where I worked for five years, was likely the pirates' last stand, since the Romans marched from the east, and when it fell, the war was effectively over. The destruction is hard to describe; when Romans intended to put an end to things, they put a period to their imperial sentences. They put a period to Phalasarna, too, so effectively that the site was never occupied again-at least until the impressive archaeological discoveries there created a tourist industry in its wake, and the pretty olive fields and grazing hills were handed over to Eurotourism. That's when the bright marble facades and new hotels commenced.

Before they left, Roman soldiers toppled the leading fortification towers into the mouth of the narrow entrance channel at Phalasarna, closing the harbor to all subsequent shipping. They burned or demolished the acropolis and all remaining battlements. They sowed salt into the soil so that nothing would grow. To this day, the little fishing harbor at Phalasarna lies on the opposite side of the great bay. The classical city was finished. And the task for Cretans in the next generation was to figure out how to start over, how to begin again.

Around the same time that Phalasarna fell, the Roman occupation of Palestine was nearing completion. Roman troops entered Jerusalem in the same decade that they finished off western Crete. What they could not have known at the time was how much trouble this Palestinian province would cause them. Revolutionary Jewish resentment simmered always just below the surface in Roman Palestine, and it boiled over twice into war (in 66-70 C.E. and again in 132-135), with horrific casualties and consequences. Jesus had been executed by the Roman civil administration in Palestine a generation before the first all-out war began. Whatever happened then, it is clear that he was executed by the Romans, not the Jews (Jewish religious courts did not have authority to render judgment in capital crimes under the Romans); hence he was likely executed as a political criminal and rabble-rouser. That is what execution by crucifixion symbolized in the outlying Roman provinces. As we now know, that event-the violent execution of the man his disciples "had hoped would save Israel"-represented a scandal that the first several generations of Jesus followers all felt the need to explain. Their strategies for doing so would vary, much as we might expect-from denying that it really happened, to denying that Jesus had a physical body for it to happen to, to the even more radical answer that Mark provided: namely, that tragic suffering represents the real, if rocky, road to redemption.

Thirty-some years after Jesus's execution, the province of Palestine erupted in revolt. The end result of four years of carnage was another systematic march over a region in rebellion, an even bloodier repetition of what the Romans did on Crete. The archaeological record suggests that this was the worst destruction the city of Jerusalem ever experienced in its long and tortured history. Even the Temple in Jerusalem, which the Romans themselves had paid to rebuild, was destroyed. In their first two generations, then, the earliest followers of Jesus endured two hammer blows, both at the hands of the Romans. Their leader was condemned and executed in the most shocking way imaginable; then their homeland and their capital were destroyed. The primary task for these people lay in figuring out how to move on, how to begin again. The answer to that question lay, in part, in the invention of a new literary genre: the gospel.

Between the time of Jesus's execution and the destruction of Jerusalem, stories about Jesus began circulating orally throughout the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean. (Some later Christians who believed that "the body is a temple" actually equated these two disasters, the destruction of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple.) In this same forty-year interim, some Jews who had followed Jesus became convinced, even after his scandalous death, that he was indeed the messiah, the one chosen to initiate a new covenantal relationship between God and Israel and (at least according to one understanding of what the prophets of Israel had predicted) everyone on earth. They took to the road shortly after the mysterious experience of Jesus's rising, scattered from the center in Jerusalem, traveled alone or in pairs and preached their various understandings of the meaning of what had happened by hanging it all on a story that began a very long time ago, with Abraham. There was no one to control the message as it spread.

These were tumultuous times of conflicting religious and political expectations, and although they met with only mixed success, these early preachers did meet with some, enough so that in the Syrian city of Antioch they began calling themselves "Christians" for the first time-although, as I have said, it is not entirely clear what this name meant to them. It meant at least this much: within a generation or two, some Jews and non-Jews had heard some version of Jesus's story and became convinced that it meant the beginning of a new world, even if what this world entailed was not entirely clear. Among such people, telling the stories of what Jesus had said, of what he had done, and of how he had died became an important part of their own devotional life. Eventually, the stories would be pieced together in a more comprehensive and far more dramatic way.

We can imagine that this all came about quite slowly, so haltingly, in fact, that this first generation of Christian bards and storytellers had no idea of what was eventually to be invented in their names: a gospel. Just as few Greeks ever asked to hear the whole Iliad or Odyssey narrated at one sitting, few early Christians would have been accustomed to hearing an entire gospel at one sitting. They heard snippets-mysterious sayings, Zen-like paradoxes, incredible stories of healing power. An astonishing variety of tales about what Jesus said and did were in circulation, with the emphasis, typical of all such storytelling, naturally focused on his pithiest sayings and his most dramatic miracles. These traditions, too, trickled out slowly over time; indeed, it took a very long time, forty years or more, for them to be assembled into a coherent story line by someone who chose a literary genre with which and through which to organize them. I will show this to be Mark's great achievement and hope to demonstrate that the new genre he created, the Christian gospel, was highly influenced by Greek tragedy. But all that lay a generation in the future. What happened immediately after Jesus's scandalous execution is where his followers' story actually began.

The Rising

Luke tells us the story in a memorable but rather confusing way. Immediately after Jesus's crucifixion, two men are walking together on the road leading out of the city of Jerusalem to a neighboring village called Emmaeus (Luke 24:13-49). One of these men seems to be a Jew with a Greek name, Cleopas; the other man is never named. It was not a particularly long journey, roughly seven miles or so. The Romans still used the Greek length of a stade (which was roughly 200 meters, or one length of a Greek athletic stadium, hence the name). So when Luke says that they had to walk sixty stades, he is also subtly reminding us that these men are culturally Greek and that they are running, running away from Jerusalem. Luke tells us that the two had both been followers of Jesus, and now, just two days after his execution, they are leaving town. They are not leaving the city to take a break, and they are clearly not leaving town to begin preaching Jesus's message. Just the opposite, in fact. They have given up entirely. Jesus's mission, on which they had pinned all of their hopes, has ended in failure. His betrayal by a close friend with the help of a cadre of Jerusalem priests and his crucifixion by the Roman civil administration have created a scandal of which these two men wish simply to be free. It's time to go home, time to bind up old wounds, time to begin to forget.

Another man joins them on the way and asks what they are talking about. They respond as gossipy Greeks are wont to do: "Are you the only man in the entire city of Jerusalem who hasn't heard what happened over the past three days?" They mention Jesus of Nazareth, call him "a mighty prophet in word and deed," and then reiterate the scandal of his bitter ending. What they say next is especially haunting, poignant, and lovely. "We had hoped," they begin, "hoped that he was the one to save Israel" (Luke 24:21). Clearly, that hope is finished; after all, these men are leaving. And they are leaving despite the fact that earlier in the morning, several of the women who had accompanied Jesus to Jerusalem, all the way from Galilee, had gone to his tomb and found it empty. Everything is a mess; now their friend's tomb may have been desecrated. So these followers of Jesus are leaving, wishing to be free of this whole sad and sordid business.

The stranger berates them. He asks ironically how anyone can be so blind. And then he walks through the Hebrew scriptures with them, "starting with Moses and working through all the Prophets" (Luke 24:27). The stranger demonstrates that all of these things have happened according to a plan, a plan clearly laid out in the scriptures, one that insists paradoxically that the only path to glory is through suffering (what Luke calls pathos).

That is a lot of scripture to work through. By the time the stranger has finished, the group has arrived at the outskirts of Emmaeus. It is getting on toward evening, so Cleopas and his anonymous friend invite the stranger to stay with them. The man agrees. And as soon as they are seated at table together, "their eyes were opened" (Luke 24:31). They recognized the stranger as Jesus himself. And in that same moment, for reasons no one can explain, he vanishes. Only now do they begin talking excitedly with one another, remarking on how "their very heart had burned" when he was talking with them on the way. And so despite the lateness of the hour, they retrace their steps and return to Jerusalem. "We had hoped," they had remarked sadly, just a few hours earlier. Past tense. Now that hope has been reborn.

The two men return to a different city or at least to a very different circle of friends. Everything is in an uproar. A large group of women had returned to Jesus's graveside on the morning after the Sabbath; his tomb was empty, and two dazzling angels had informed them that he was no longer there, that he had "risen up," just as he had predicted he would in Galilee. This is interesting. The Jesus Luke describes in his gospel was always surrounded by women, so much so that some members of his audience were a bit shocked, if not scandalized (not only Greeks love gossip, after all). Luke tells us who some of these women were by name: Mary of Magdala first; then an otherwise unknown woman named Joanna; then another woman named Mary, who is presumably Jesus's mother; and an anonymous group of others. The women dutifully return to the disciples, the inner circle of Jesus's male followers, and report what they saw and heard at his tomb. No one believes them; we are not told why. Is it because they are women? Is it because the disciples cannot believe that they wouldn't be told first? Or is it that what they have reported, about Jesus' "rising up," is simply too much for them to believe? We don't know yet.

What we do know is that Jesus himself, or an apparition of him, has appeared to two men on the Emmaeus road. By the time these two get back to Jerusalem and rejoin the disciples, Jesus has struck again. Now he has appeared to Simon, the disciple he nicknamed Peter, "the Rock," and everyone has gathered together in a buzz of renewed excitement. The other shoe finally drops. Jesus appears again, to all of them gathered together. And here is the amazing thing: they are still afraid, and they still do not believe their eyes. They are afraid that he is a spirit or a ghost. So Jesus puzzles it out patiently with them. "Look at me," he smiles reassuringly. "Does a spirit have flesh and blood as I do?" He "shows them his hands and feet" (Luke 24:39, though it's not clear what Luke means by that), and still the group doesn't believe him. But the phrases Luke uses now are sympathetic, gracious, and reassuring. Jesus understands that now they doubt "out of joy and wonder" (Luke 24:41). They don't want to believe, they are actually afraid of believing, and so they deny what they are seeing with their own eyes. So he proves his point by, well, by eating. For some reason, a little fish and bread seals it; they know it is Jesus, in the flesh, before them now. Eating had always been symbolically important to his ministry, according to Luke-what he ate and with whom.

Jesus now reiterates what he said on the road to Emmaeus. He uses the Hebrew scriptures to prove that there is a straight line leading from suffering to repentance (or "change of heart") to the release from sins. He tells his apostles that he intends for them to "preach" this message to all peoples, beginning right here in Jerusalem. But not right away. Jesus tells them that first they must wait, in Jerusalem, until they are "clothed with a higher power" (Luke 24:49). Then they all walk to the outskirts of the city together, and Jesus disappears again. The elated group returns to the city, devoting each day to the ceaseless praise of God in the Jerusalem Temple.

This is a very strange and mysterious story, once we begin to think about the details. For starters, the nature of Jesus's resurrection, if that is what it was, is not clear at all. He seems more like a phantasm than a man, and it is interesting that this is the first impression the disciples have when they see him. He goes out of his way to prove his bodiliness to them, goes out of his way to eat and drink in front of them, but then he disappears. In fact, throughout the day, it seemed as if Jesus were more like a live wire: each time he touches the ground, there is an explosion, and he is blown some distance away by the blast. He is buried in Jerusalem. Then he is gone. Next he is walking on the road to Emmaeus. Then he is back in Jerusalem, with Peter. Then he appears to all of his followers together. Then he is gone for good.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from This Tragic Gospel by Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. Copyright © 2008 by Louis A. Ruprecht. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. holds the William M. Suttles Chair in Religious Studies at Georgia State University and is an active member of the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Biblical Literature, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Society for Values in Higher Education.

Despite the subtitle of this book, which some general readers may find alarming, Ruprecht's argument is well reasoned and reflects concerns not new to scholars and Bible translators. The author, who teaches religious studies at Georgia State University, places in juxtaposition the gospels of Mark and John, suggesting that John was written not to supplement Mark's book, but rather to replace it and create a more strident, less human portrait of Jesus. Ruprecht dissects the two gospels and shows how the Johannine influence has prevailed in Christian history, in particular with reformers like Martin Luther. He also explores how John's gospel may have fed into the centuries-old plague of anti-Semitism in the church and beyond. In contrast to the self-assured Jesus described in John, Mark's Jesus is conflicted and ambiguous, working miracles but commanding those he healed not to tell anyone. And where (in Ruprecht's view) Mark sees Jesus' suffering as without purpose, in John suffering was itself the purpose. Although Ruprecht's ideas may surprise and discomfit nonspecialists, they deserve a read and are accessibly presented. (Aug. 8)

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